"Just as an attentive gardener carefully prunes a plant here and pulls a few weeds there, Krauss prepares every element of the photograph by hand."
Felix Hoffmann
Ingar Krauss' stagings of plants and animals propose a portraiture of another kind, in which human faces and personalities give way to the flora and fauna of his immediate surroundings. Born in East Berlin in 1965, Krauss learned a trade and worked for many years as a psychiatric caregiver before turning to photography in the mid-1990s. After moving his studio from Berlin to the Brandenburg countryside, he became a gardener and began dedicating much of his time to plants and vegetables.
Within stage-like boxes of his own construction, Krauss arranges fruit, vegetables, plants, dead birds and other animals under carefully controlled natural light. His subjects appear as protagonists on a stage, arranged to create geometric tension.
Working with a large-format camera, Krauss records these arrangements as monochrome analogue photographs on matte gelatin-silver paper, then adds colour by hand with a delicate glaze of oil paint. Rooted in the German Romantic longing for self-knowledge through nature, the works pursue a hidden relationship between human inner life and the worlds of plants and animals. Through careful arrangement and depiction, Krauss seeks to transform commonplace subjects by "replacing inattention with contemplation."
Rather than invoking vanitas, Krauss' still lifes are animated by a quiet lightness and a certain playfulness, particularly in the way the vegetables are staged alone or assembled into small ensembles. As Felix Hoffmann writes, Krauss' work "makes visible the oscillation between lightness, life, transience and death."